(11-08-2020, 08:31 PM)hazard Wrote: Defunding the police isn't about dismantling law enforcement. In those instances where complete dismantling is even considered it's because the people proposing it have concluded that the police has not only failed to perform its duty, it's done so so catastrophically that restarting from zero is the only option.
Defunding the police is about removing a number of community services that now fall upon the police but the police is not suited to handle from their remit, and shifting the funding for performing those services to agencies that are. Especially since the warrior cop mentality that has taken so much of the USA's police forces makes the sort of community connections that are necessary for performing those services very difficult indeed.
Well, shifting things to people are sent to handle over to more qualified personnel I can't argue with. However, starting from zero is a bridge too far for me. If the police are corrupt, you weed out the corruption and replace the soiled with the honest, but to leave a gaping hole in law enforcement coverage, even temporarily, is a massive invitation to violent crime to operate with abandon. I've seen what happens when police are utterly forced to surrender their duties so lawlessness can operate with abandon. Seattle's CHAZ experiment resulted in the murders of several people involved because instead of police, you had anarchists (and arguably outright attempted secessionists) taking the law into their own hands, and people were killed in the area of that lawless zone because the police were forced to stand down completely in favor of what looked like something out of a Mad Max movie.
I regret overzealous cops overstepping their bounds, they should pay for it, but I do not agree with any political figure who says all police in the area must suffer for the actions of their trigger happy/corrupt associates.